Sign in

The Best Movies of 2012

December 9, 2012

These are the years of radical cinema in all directions—extremely idiosyncratic efforts both in the lower-budget realms of independent filmmaking and in the mercantile reaches of franchise films—and 2012 has been a wild ride, even as, in “awards season,” much of the wildest work around gets pushed to the sidelines and surprisingly unsurprising films of mild invention but ostensibly important content rush to the forefront of critical appreciation.

Most of the best Hollywood films came out early—long before the gate was lifted on the quasi-officially titled batch of Oscarizables that will slug it out between now and February, pumped like Rock’em Sock’em Robots by the pushes and tugs and twitches and exhortations of the studios and publicists that send them to do battle. The movie year is divided more or less in two—the first ten months (with a little give at the end) and the home stretch—and it’s like a relay race in which those who pass the baton are competing less against each other than against those to whom they pass it and are therefore out of the running in advance. It’s a silly system that works only because members of the Academy have demonstrated that they can be swayed by the ballyhoo. The Oscars may be, in effect, Hollywood’s ideal self-image, the celebration of what its insiders want to be celebrated for, but, with awards translating into dollars—and vice versa—it’s also an unintended reflection of the industry’s practicalities.

A few of the late-year entries, however, are notable, even excellent. (Some are on my list below.) 2012 has been a good year for Hollywood and off-Hollywood. Note, once more, the remarkable Hollywood nexus of the Gotham and Independent Spirit nominees, as the path of independent financing becomes ever more significant for filmmakers whose work doesn’t fit into franchise formatting. And that’s a good thing, from the perspective of filmmaking—whether it means that directors and actors share producers’ risks in getting their work made, or that complicit producers give a director’s vision free rein. But the latter notion makes some critics uneasy. There’s an undercurrent of thought—one rooted in an antiquated and nostalgic vision of a halcyon classic Hollywood that supposedly both reached the masses and made modest and un-self-conscious art—that looks to producers to restrain the idiosyncrasies of directors and fit them into a readily marketable package of popular appeal. These critics yearn for the adversarial relationship of producer and director, seeing the producer as the supporter of democratic values and the director as a sort of egomaniacal élitist who, unrestrained, would spend someone else’s money frivolously to make a movie that would please himself and his friends.

Of course, that relationship becomes adversarial only if the producer doesn’t see himself as a sort of benefactor, a patron of the arts whose very role is to finance and to foster individual expression—and, as ever, it all depends on who the individual is and what the nature of the vision is. It’s fairly obvious that strong producers improve films made by mediocre directors but often constrain or dilute the distinctiveness and individuality of the work of good ones. There is a political agenda hidden within the critics’ aesthetic preference for the strong hand of the producer, as critics demagogically put themselves in the position of defenders of the people—defending them from radical outliers and finding popular tastes with which to align themselves. It’s another case of left and right agreeing without common ground and leading to bad policy—and, in this case, bad art.

The history of cinema is surely filled with overbudgeted and undercontrolled follies—far more of them of a rankly commercial than of an idiosyncratically personal kind—and it’s also filled with grand apparent follies that are artistic triumphs of the first order, from “Greed” and “Lola Montès” to “Heaven’s Gate” and “Ishtar.” If Terrence Malick’s magnificent “The Tree of Life” didn’t turn out to be a ruinous folly, it is, I think, because he was, from the start, in a healthier relationship with his producers. He didn’t have to pretend that his film would be something other than what it turned out to be, and, as a result, he was able to conceive his entire process of production—as protracted or unusual as it may have been—in proper balance with the means at hand. The underlying phenomenon of the best recent cinema, at least in the United States, is the economic shift toward independent production, whether at high or low budgets, and this is, I think, one reason for the artistic significance and variety of the American cinema.

But there’s a poignant paradox at work. It’s hard for the best directors to thrive in the absence of a thriving industry, one that sustains careers for actors, technicians, and suppliers, yet it’s hard for national cinemas to sustain themselves against the popularity of Hollywood in the absence of subsidies. But subsidies, though they often help established directors to continue working, also foster—especially among young filmmakers—a bureaucratic mindset that often seeps into the work. Strong artistic temperaments resist, and that’s what matters—but an ambient aesthetic of complacent representation is one of the things they have to resist, and it’s worth noting that the foreign films represented here are also the most fiercely defiant of familiar codes and modes of naturalistic so-called storytelling.

Speaking of defiant directors, this is no season for old men. The New York Film Festival’s grand trio of films from Abbas Kiarostami and Alain Resnais (both scheduled for U.S. release next year) and the late Raúl Ruiz all would have been up near the top of the list. Instead they’ll be on next year’s. For that matter, some of the young find themselves squeezed aside, as with Ying Liang’s “When Night Falls,” a fierce yet analytical, intimately compassionate yet politically furious drama based closely on the actual 2008 case of a Chinese man who was convicted of killing police officers and executed. It, too, would have made this list even more crowded.

I suspect that there’s also a part-economic, part-administrative reason for another peculiarity in the state of American filmmaking these days: the general conformism and tight formatting of much of documentary filmmaking. Of course, there are excellent, audacious documentaries being made, too (several are on the list), but many of the most heralded ones fit into a range of moods, tones, and methods that are even narrower than those of award-winning fictions. One small, synecdochic example: the use of lugubrious music to sway the mood and set the tone, and which is often reminiscent of what Jason Segel’s character composes for a TV-thriller series in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” Ruefulness, compassion, outrage, fine feelings, and virtuous motives are often too easily packaged in films where the filmmakers seem less interested in discovering than in asserting. There could be a psychological element, too, rooted in the motives for devoting oneself to a documentary subject for years, and the extraordinary duration of production (and pre-production, and post-production, and distribution—in which filmmakers themselves are increasingly involved) is also a matter of difficulties in finding financing. The economic crisis of documentary filmmaking turns up as an aesthetic one, too.

Independent filmmaking remains (indeed, is accelerating as) a self-renewing, ever-growing source of inventive energy, but the big problem filmmakers face is distribution—theatrical distribution, at a time when it remains the principal impetus for review in major publications and qualification for year-end awards. Writers may put whatever they want on their own list, but publications that run polls and organizations that give awards have strict criteria for the movies that qualify. (That’s why the category of Best Undistributed Film that appears on many sites has taken on such sudden and well-deserved significance.) But with the economic obstacles to theatrical distribution and increasing prevalence of video on demand, it seems important for the editorial definition of distribution to change as well. The experience of going to a movie theatre and watching a film (or, more often than not, a digital video) on a big screen in a public space and a dark room with an audience of strangers is wonderful—but needn’t be exclusive or decisive. It’s tempting to think of the movie theatre as a concert hall and home viewing as listening to recordings, or of the theatre as a museum and home video as looking at reproductions of paintings.

Unless it’s more like defining marriage as being between one man and one woman because that’s the way it always was, or denying the right to privacy because the word isn’t in the Constitution—or like distinguishing between “writers” (those who still use pens and pencils) and “typers” (who use typewriters) and, for that matter, “computers” (etc.). Overly literal interpretation does injustice to experience. And what the new radical cinema captures, more surely and more truthfully than its predecessors, is radical experience, inner and outer.

This list, in its first state, crystallized as pairs and trios that formed on no single principle other than that of automatism: sometimes, three films released around the same time; three independent films; three off-Hollywood films; three films by one director (yes); or groupings that appeared first on the page and only later yielded up a kernel of significance, or quasi-surrealistic insignificance (one-word titles, two-word titles). I’ve kept some, tweaked others.

Tied for first, listed in alphabetical order. Films of blatant, reckless, ecstatic beauty that make the quest for beauty their very subject and that face its moral implications; that take on the ultimate themes of love and death with piercing tenderness and anarchic humor, rapidity and precision, grandeur and intimacy, and an unerring yet personal, spontaneous yet deeply thoughtful sense of form. That take up the challenge of history (cinematic, artistic, personal—and even political, from oblique angles that offer surprising perspectives) and thereby take their place in history. Both have an astonishing reach, a vast geographical embrace. These are the instant classics, ready-made for the distant future.

No film brought its subject to life with a more surprising style or seemed to surprise its director as much with the conclusions it reached. It’s a movie of inextricable pairings: mastery of others is inseparable from mastery of self; method, from madness; creation, from power; deception, from self-delusion; performance, from being; and the biggest part of life is filling in the blanks around losses. Its subject is greatness in failure and horror in success, so how could it have made money at the box office?

Two movies about making movies. It’s Hong Sang-soo’s year, with three films in release (the other two are below); this one stands out for its jagged emotional edges, aggressively intricate approach to its subject, and extraordinarily inspired, brashly vigorous image-making. As for Jafar Panahi’s film made—largely with his iPhone—while under house arrest in Tehran, it pushes outraged reason to a furious pitch of imagination; it turns cinematic form into a moral assertion.

The next ten, ordered arbitrarily:

“To Rome with Love”: Woody Allen, master of metaphors, comes up with one of his greatest—and gives Ellen Page a supporting turn close to that of Dianne Wiest in “Hannah and her Sisters.”

“Tabu”: Love and colonialism, or, can Europeans live well when their countries do good?

“The Color Wheel”: The director Alex Ross Perry stars alongside Carlen Altman, and, playing a sort-of-grown-up pair of siblings too weighted down for takeoff, they spar as fiercely and draw blood more surely than Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Aided by Sean Price Williams’s cinematography, he keeps the camera at just the distance to stay on the precarious edge between comedy and drama. An independent film of classical elements and modern methods and moods.

“The Deep Blue Sea”: Minor compared only to Terence Davies’s other films; not as extremely stylized or intimate as “Distant Voices, Still Lives” or “The Long Day Closes.” But it does something they don’t: reproduces the tones and moods of grand melodrama from the time in which it’s set, London, 1950, and features one of the great flashbacks—to wartime, with a Davies standby, the group sing, raised to a new level of historical consciousness.

“Damsels in Distress”: Whit Stillman’s return isn’t a return to form but the discovery of a new one—his aphoristic brilliance is now couched in a poetically excessive rhetoric of hyperstylized rapidity, which only an extraordinarily nimble and virtuosic cast could keep spinning with a perfect gyroscopic rectitude. The narrowed scope and stylized setting suggest vast inner dimensions of repressed pain as well as overtly prescriptive remedies.

“We Have a Pope”: The director Nanni Moretti, who co-stars, takes a back seat to Michel Piccoli’s poignant performance as a Cardinal who, with the candor of faith, begins to question his lifetime of faith. The political fury of the final scene is an honorable homage to one of the greatest scenes of all time, the ending of “The Great Dictator.”

“This Is 40”: Or, rictus: the painted-on smile of a man who loves his family as well as the wild life. It’s being called a “kind of sequel” to “Knocked Up” but better seen as a pendant to “Funny People”: imagine Adam Sandler’s character not having cheated on Leslie Mann and finding himself in Eric Bana’s position. Think of Cassavetes and call it “Husband.”

“Red Hook Summer”: As ferociously skeptical as “We Have a Pope,” with a pair of child actors as talented as those in “Moonrise Kingdom,” a text as exquisite as that of “Damsels in Distress,” and an artistic metaphor as great as in “To Rome with Love.”

“MagicMike”: The best choreographed film of the year—and that’s apart from the strip numbers.

“Fake ItSo Real”: Robert Greene’s documentary about a local pro-wrestling circuit avoids the clichés of the subject and of the form and offers revelations about its subject as art and sport, about the lives of its agonists and aspirants, and about performance as such.

And a blank space because I’m sure there’s at least one important film that’s missing and that I expect to catch up with in the next little while—will report back.

Categories

Best Director: Don’t make me choose between Wes Anderson and Leos Carax. To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, if the coin rolls under the davenport, I’d go for Paul Thomas Anderson.

Best Actor: Denis Lavant (“Holy Motors”); Joaquin Phoenix is a close second, Philip Seymour Hoffman a close third, both for “The Master.”

Best Actress: Greta Gerwig (“Damsels in Distress”); second, Rachel Weisz: I’m gratified by the N.Y.F.C.C.’s choice of Weisz for her performance in “The Deep Blue Sea,” which is distinguished by her recreation of a period style of acting. But Gerwig sends a very difficult text aloft with deft humor and graceful emotion; it’s an astonishing feat.